Why MySQL gave case insensitive string results

Problem

Today MySQL was giving me crappy results… when I searched for a user with name ‘GUEST’ it gave me a user with name ‘Guest’. Which is close… but not close enough. Somehow MySQL handled my input in a case insensitive way.

During my journey across the internet looking for answers, I found that the case sensitivity of table names depends on your platform because MySQL uses files to store tables. I also found many users asking how to do case insensitive queries… but nobody answering *my* question.